Star-Crossed Lovers in a Star-Crossed Land: Romeo and Juliet in Palestine
Keyword: 
Palestinian theater
Gaza theater
Shakespeare staging
Romeo and Juliet
cultural destruction
film and drama under occupation
Abstract: 

Reflecting on a 2016 production of Romeo and Juliet in Gaza at Gaza City’s Said al-Mishal Cultural Centre – destroyed two years later in a targeted Israeli air strike – the author turns to two other stagings of Romeo and Juliet in embattled Palestine, a joint 1994 production by the Israeli Khan Theater in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Kasaba Theater in Ramallah in the aftermath of the Oslo accords, and In Fair Palestine, a film made by students at the Friends School in Ramallah during the second Palestinian intifada with an initial screening in 2008. All three productions tell much about the times in which they were created.

Author biography: 

Penny Johnson is a writer and researcher based in Ramallah and a contributing editor to the Jerusalem Quarterly. Her most recent book is Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine (Melville House, 2019).